In Conversation

The journalist-turned-screenwriter discusses his latest collaboration with director Kathryn Bigelow, a harrowing re-creation of 60s-era racial violence, and answers those who’ve wondered if it’s a story properly told by white filmmakers.

The movie Detroit takes audiences inside a chaotic, shameful summer night in American history when three African-American men were killed during a botched police raid at Detroit’s Algiers Motel in 1967. The film reunites director Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal, two filmmakers who have previously distilled intense, real-life tales of war into cinematic thrillers like The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty. Working this time with an ensemble cast that includes John Boyega,Will Poulter,Algee Smith, and Jason Mitchell, Bigelow and Boal turned their attention to a conflict on American soil, one that is in many ways still boiling.

Boal spoke with Vanity Fair about learning the truth about the Algiers, collaborating with Bigelow, and tackling a story of racial injustice as a white screenwriter.

Vanity Fair: Some of the facts surrounding what happened that night at the Algiers Motel are murky. How did you go about actually determining the truth before you set about writing your script?

Mark Boal: The truth is known. The truth is that three young, African-American men were killed with shotguns by police. That's not open to dispute. What's lost to history is who exactly pulled which trigger and why, and to some degree when. There was a pretty serious investigative effort put into understanding what happened at the Algiers by the Detroit Police Department. . . . I don't know if the prosecution was serious, but the investigation was serious. The F.B.I. also looked at it, and there were anthropologists who looked at it and spoke to people, and there were a lot of newspaper reporters interested in it. The way the police behaved is very well documented. The dialogue, though, I wrote. Nobody knows exactly what was said. Even though I talked to the survivors . . . nobody has a verbatim memory of something that happened 50 years ago. The dialogue is invented. The physical interactions between the police and the victims, I wrote that based on either somebody's memory or a contemporaneous account of the time.

Once you knew what the facts were, how did you decide when to fictionalize?

It's instinct, it's craft. It's storytelling, it's authenticity. There is a way that stories can get to an underlying truth, and that's sort of what I'm trying to row toward.

You made an unconventional choice with this script, in that the characters don’t determine their own fate. Can you explain that?

Popular storytelling involves characters determining their own destiny on some level by overcoming obstacles that pop up in their path. That's really gratifying to audiences, because it affirms the idea of free will, and that you can have agency in your own life. In this case, in this story, for a young African-American man in the late 60s, his ability to exercise his free will to determine his fate runs up against this institutionalized set of prejudices. In this case, they're insurmountable. The characters have much less freedom of movement because the social forces around them are hemming them in. They don't have the freedom to determine their fates. The film, I hope, ends kind of poignantly, but it doesn't end with people triumphing over the forces of racism. That's not what happened here. It seemed in poor taste and inauthentic to tack a kind of symmetrical sentimentally satisfying ending onto this story. It's sort of tacky to over-complexify how racism worked in this case. These young guys were terrorized and they were brutalized, and so I wrote it in that way to be frankly brutal. And to present it as somehow morally complicated and more nuanced than that, I think, is nuts. It kind of runs against the sort of mythology that we look to movies for, and so people find that disappointing. Movies are usually about the power of the individual. American movies, let's say. It just is kind of an insane statement to make when you're talking about what happened at the Algiers. This is not a story about the power of the individual; it’s a story about the power of this rampaging police force to squash individual freedom.

Some people felt that a story so centered on the issue of racism would be better left in the hands of black filmmakers. What do you think of that critique?

I mean, I've heard that from white reporters.

Some black journalists and black critics have talked about it too. It’s also a question that has come up around a new show the Game of Thrones writers are making, called Confederate.

I wrote this story because I went and talked to the people who were involved, and they told me what happened to them, and that's what made me want to write it. I felt moved by their experiences, and I thought other people might find it moving too. I suppose if I have some tiny bit of influence in Hollywood, this is how I chose to deploy it. Probably another writer would have done it differently, but that's sort of true of everything. There is a responsibility, I think, to tell stories like this as well as I can, because it deals with such profound underlying issues. I take the responsibility seriously, and I try to be diligent and talk to people who were there or who were experts on the 60s or were experts in policing or whatever, and try to do my work. That's really all I can do. I guess I would hope that people judge the movie based on its quality or lack thereof.

You and Kathryn Bigelow have made three films together now. What’s your collaboration like?

We have a shorthand. At this point, we kind of know what each other's likes and dislikes are. She's very interested in a certain kind of intimate, muscular, intense filmmaking, and so I try not to write stuff that's boring because I know that she might shoot it—but she'll probably just cut it. As the director, Kathryn is controlling the intensity knob. There's an infinite number of ways you can shoot the same scene, depending on what kind of effect you are trying to achieve . . . the graphicness of something, that's basically determined in camera and in editing more than it is in the screenplay. I'm actually pretty happy with how the dialogue came out. That was a very challenging part of writing this. I was born in 1973, for one thing, and I didn't live through the 60s. As you point out, I'm white. I kind of had to invent a period-correct dialogue that's not so period that people find it distancing. You want the story to feel like it could have happened today, and you also have to ground it in a very specific time. That's something that I spent . . . probably of anything in the screenplay, that was probably the most involving piece.

Any particular lines that are an example of what you're talking about?

I had a couple of conversations, long conversations with a writer at The New Yorker named Jelani Cobb, who was kind enough to read some of the drafts as I was going. . . . In the interactions between some of the young people at the hotel and the police, I remember Jelani feeling like the way I had drawn one of the characters was too, sort of, 50s. I had gone too far back.

Too deferential. There's a scene in the movie where John Conyers went down to the area where there were a lot of crowds and tried to calm everybody down and get people back to normal life. He was obviously unsuccessful, and there's a moment when somebody from the crowd yells out, basically . . . I forget the line actually, but“Bring Stokely, we don't want to hear from you, bring Stokely Carmichael down here.” I have no idea if anybody actually said that, but I know that [Conyers] was heckled and he had to leave because his message was met with a lot of resistance. There was a stronger, Black Panther-ish presence in Detroit then than people might otherwise realize.

This is the first film to be distributed by Megan Ellison’s company, Annapurna Pictures. Megan also produced Zero Dark Thirty, and she’s financing a TV project you’re working on about the 2016 election. You obviously like working for her.

Megan deserves a lot of props for this movie. I don't know if there are any other financiers out there who would have supported it to the level that she did. I think it's safe to say that the movie as it exists would not have happened without her. . . . If you were a studio bean counter and you were looking at the material and the subject matter and the casting, you would come up with a more modest version of telling this story. Megan takes big artistic risks, or big risks on artists is the better way to put it. Yeah, obviously, personally, I fucking love that.

For your TV project on the election, how much are you tracking the current events in the White House, like the Russia investigation? Does this series end with election night?

I'm kind of feeling my way through the material and trying to wrap my arms around what the fuck just happened. I'm not sure where it ends yet. It’s sort of early days. I'm all in on this one, and I'm following the amazing, unprecedented unraveling that's going on in Washington right now.